> The notaries can then add a record on the block chain saying roughly "I do notarization act X on document Y" (It'll be the equivalent of what they enter in th

> The notaries can then add a record on the block chain saying roughly "I do notarization act X on document Y" (It'll be the equivalent of what they enter in their log books today and there will be some corresponding stamp that they'll stamp the physical document with, like they do today). They could now even notarize digital documents by including a hash of the digitized document in their record. > Finally, the agency receiving the notarized document (digital or electronic) can easily go onto the blockchain and verify that the document was indeed notarized as claimed and that the notarization is not a forgery. Or, they could just sign it using their key using old school public key cryptography. If you want to check if a notary is real just use certificate chains, just like for TLS. What is unique to blockchain is trustless timestamping but timestamping services work very well in the X.509 world and are used for example for code signing (so that even if your certificate expires the signature is valid).